Major Literary Figures - ENG 350 Resource Guide

Showalter describes how women authors in the Victorian age, including George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, were unable to escape the condescending judgment of critics who refused to believe that women were capable of producing art that was equal to that of men.

Period of mid- and late- 19th century in England, covering the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. This period was one of significant industrial and urban development in Britain, and also saw a massive expansion of the British Empire. In domestic politics the period is particularly notable for the rivalry between the Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli and his Liberal successor William Ewart Gladstone.

The term Victorian literature refers to novels and poetry published during the sixty-three-year-long reign of Queen Victoria. The works generally reflect the widespread changes in society at that time, realistically describing both the technological and social transformations. Victorian authors wrote poems and novels that commented on, and criticized, the way the Industrial Revolution and strict class divisions affected people, especially the lower classes.

The Victorian era spans the years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). This era overlaps the years of the British romantic period, which started in the 1830s. It also overlaps with the years of the Industrial Revolution, roughly from 1760 to 1840, and its aftermath. The Industrial Revolution marked the transition from mainly agrarian and artisan societies to manufacturing and industrial production. The Victorian era, then, was one of great prosperity and growth for the middle classes.

To a greater extent than any other literary form, the novel is consistently and directly engaged with the society in which the writer lives and feels compelled to explain, extol, or criticize. The English novel, from its disparate origins to its development in the eighteenth century, from its rise in the nineteenth century to its present state, has been strongly influenced by the social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural histories of England.

In this chapter we explore how The Origin, Darwin's ideas on evolution, influenced not only scientific development but spilled over into the humanities as well. Taken up by historians, social and religious leaders and political theorists not only in Victorian England but throughout the western world, these were ideas seized upon with remarkable fervor by theorists wildly opposed to each other's movements.

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Using a case study of the appearance of social justice beliefs in Victorian-era Britain, this article develops an explanation of the link between history and morality by applying field theory to capture the historical genesis of a field. A moral way of evaluating poverty and inequality developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain, with a trajectory extending back to Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population and moving forward to the Fabians, the Settlement Movement, and other social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century.

The communications industry, of which publishing and printing was the most important part in the nineteenth century, accelerated the processes of economic, social and cultural change by dramatically increasing the volume and speed with which information, news and entertainment flowed through society.

The Victorian Web, which originated in hypermedia environments (Intermedia, Storyspace) that existed long before the World Wide Web, is one of the oldest academic and scholarly websites.

When Victoria ascended the throne, there were one-and-a-half million Londoners; at her death, there were four-and-a-half million, a population explosion spurred by the Irish potato famine and new laws which allowed Jews escaping from Russian pogroms to immigrate.